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THE GETTY CENTER LIBRARY 


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By 
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CTURES OF OLD CHINATOWN 


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THE STREET OF THE GAMBLERS. 


“Underneath their artistic appreciation of the grace in life, runs a hard, 


> 


streak of barbarism.’ 


mel RES OF 


OLD CHINATOWN 


BY 
ARNOLD GENTHE 


WITH TEXT BY 
WILL IRWIN 


NEW YORK 
MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 
1909 


| 
| 


Nt 


Copyright 1908, by 
MoFFat, YARD AND Com ANY 
NEW YORE §2ea 


— 


All Rights Reserve 


Published, September, 1908 a 
Reprinted, June, 1909 7 


cad 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


THE STREET OF THE GAMBLERS 
Tue Fisu PEeppLEeR 

A Bootu—FisuH ALLEY 

THe ALLEY 

WAITING FOR THE Cars . 

Tue AIRING . 

Loarers YOUNG AND OLD 

Tue ButTcHEeR 

Tue Lity VENpDor 

Tue Toy VENDoR . 

Tue MorTuHer 

THE SHOEMAKER 

REscuED SLAvE GIRLS 

A CorNER ON THE HILLSIDE . 
Tue Ceitrtar Door 

Younc ARISTOCRATS : 
A Famity FROM THE CONSULATE 
Houipay Dress 


New YeEAr’s Day BEFORE THE THEATRE . 


Houipay FINery 
‘Dress CLOTHES 
THe CHINESE SMILE 
THe MouNTEBANK 


A Vista 


Frontispiece 


PAGE 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS | 
““No Faczs!” : ; : : : ai aed 
““No Lixen!” =. ; : eta : 
Tuer BaLttoon Man : Wagers ‘ . 
On Dupont STREET. : : : So 
Tue SwEETMEAT STAND ; ; é Re: 
Tue Lity-Foor Woman ; : “aie 
““ Doorways IN Dim Hatr-ToNeE” . Re « 
Try > Hor Vienne eas eee <3 Be: 
Tue Leoparp SKIN. ; : : oe ee 
Tue Morninc Market : 5 : era 
Tue TonG ProciaMATION . 5 ee 
Berore THE Bie Joss House . ‘ ; (gee : 
“Tur Devin’s Kircnen” spy Nigot .  .  . 
Tue New Toy . : pats ~? ee au. 
‘THe CHILDREN’s Hour . ; ; , ey 
Tue VEGETABLE PEDDLER  . : ati 
““He Bione Mu!? : : Mt 
Tue TINKERS 3 ¥ ; ‘ Aey; oe 
Arter ScHoon . RD aie < oo | 
Tue CHINESE SaLvaTION ARMY . Mae oe 
Tue Paper CouLector . ; is : B : 
Tue Latest Born Sarak: : . ee 
Tue Last or Orp CuInatowN . «we 

5% 


FOREWORD 


My Dear Dr. Genthe: 

Long before I knew who you were, I used to 
mark you in the shadows and recesses of China- 
town, your little camera half-hidden under your 
coat, your considering eye and crafty hand of the 
artist alert to take your shy and superstitious mod- 
els unawares. Later, it was my privilege to fol- 
low you sometimes—to watch you playing your 
Germanic patience against their Chinese patience, 
to marvel at you, in dark room and studio, work- 
ing with those mysterious processes by which you 


—more than any other man alive—have made art 
out of the play-time snap-shot. Now, after the 
great disaster, all that remains for your work of a 
decade is this same picture record of old China- 
town at which you worked so lovingly for eight 
years. 

In the summer of steel and steam drills and 
heroic enthusiasm—the summer of rebuilding—you 


FOREWORD 


and I passed through the new, clean Chinatown. 
It was a clear, sea-scented night, I remember, and 
very late. We stopped beneath the ruins of Old 
St. Mary’s. The new-rising city, like the old one 
in dim, suggestive contour—as an adult face is 
like its childish counterpart—stretched out at our 
feet. Where the vivid carouse and romance of 
Dupont and Kearny Streets had been, a black 
hollow, mysterious, awful, as though the Pit had 
taken Hell’s Half Acre back to itself; beyond, a — 
wall of steel skeletons and gaunt, windowless 
towers. ‘The scattered lights, placed where never 
lights would be in finished and inhabited struc- 
tures, gave a dreadful air of strangeness and des- 
olation to this city vista. I stood as one who sees 
spirits. And you spoke: 

“Rubber boots and copper kettles in the shop 
windows—and we have still to call it Chinatown!” 
You had been looking backward, I perceived, as 
I had been looking forward. So, with the ruined 
tins of St. Mary’s creaking above us in the night 
wind, we talked about that little city of our love, 
Chinatown. “No, it’s gone,” said I, “And beauty, 
or at least such beauty as they know, cannot live 


FOREWORD 


in Class A buildings.” You, like a true partizan, 
fell to defending as soon as you found me agree- 
ing with your criticisms. “They won’t remain 
Class A for long,” you said. “The Chinese will 
make them over somehow. ‘They can no more live 
in inappropriate ugliness than we in dirt.” Yet 
we both sighed for the Chinatown which we knew, 
and which is not any more except in the shadowing 
of your little films. 

You, the only man who ever had the patience to 
photograph the Chinese, you, who found art in the 
snap-shot—you were making yourself uncon- 
sciously, all that time, the sole recorder of old 
Chinatown. I but write as a frame for your pic- 
tures; I am illustrating you. If, in these writ- 
ings, I use the past tense, I do not mean to imply 
that our Californian Chinese have changed their 
natures or their manners. Much of what I de- 
scribe here has survived, and much more will pre- 
vail. It is just that your lenses and plates record 
only the past; and, I, embroidering your work, 
‘have tried to keep in tone. 


Wii Irwin. 


OLD CHINATOWN 


BY WILL IRWIN 


ROM the moment when you crossed the 
golden, dimpling bay, whose moods ran the 
gamut of beauty, from the moment when you 
sailed between those brown-and-green headlands 
which guarded the Gate to San Francisco, you 
heard always of Chinatown. It was the first thing 
which the tourist asked to see, the first thing which 
the guides offered to show. Whenever, in any 
channel of the Seven Seas, two world-wanderers 
met and talked about the City of Many Adven- 
tures, Chinatown ran like a thread through their 
reminiscences. Raised on a hillside, it glimpsed at 
you from every corner of that older, more pic- 
turesque San Francisco which fell to dust and cin- 
ders in the great disaster of 1906. From the cliffs 
which crowned the city, one could mark it off as a 
sombre spot, shot with contrasting patches of green 
and gold, in the panorama below. Its inhabitants, 
1 


2 OLD CHINATOWN 


overflowing into the American quarters, | m 
bright and quaint the city streets. Its exampl: Ss 
of art in common things, always before the: L 


in “ane worse order hie our beans woul 
kept! In a newer and stronger San ] 
rises a newer, Saas more heathful me 


ture? ers iS the ue reach se Ros — 


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ad Taddad HSIt AHL 


A BOOTH—FISH~ALLEY. 


“That horror to the nose, that perfume to the eye.” 


OLD CHINATOWN 3 


perfume to the eye? Where are those broken, 
dingy streets, in which the Chinese made art of 
rubbish ? 

I hope that some one will arise, before this gen- 
eration is passed, to record that conquest of affec- 
tion by which the Californian Chinese transformed 
themselves from our race-adversaries to our dear, 
subject people. Theirs will be all the glory of that 
tale, ours all the shame. In the dawn of the min- 
ing rush, the little, trading Cantonese began to ap- 
pear in California. The American, the Celt, the 
Frenchman came for gold—gold washed out of the 
hills—uncounted millions. Gold brought the 
Chinaman also; but his ideas were modest. The 
prospect of two, four, five dollars a day was 
enough for him, who had made only ten cents a day 
at home. He asked simply to do menial work at a 
menial’s wage. Beside our white pioneers, he took 
his part in the glorious episode of the Pacific con- 
quest. He, with them, starved on the desert, died 
on the trails, faced Indian bullets and arrows. 
Wherever the report of gold called into being a 
new camp, he struggled in behind the whites, built 
his laundry, his cook-house or his gold rocker, 


4 OLD CHINATOWN 


girded up his pig-tail, and went to work. In his 
own spirit of quiet heroism, he shared all the hard- 
ships of our giant men—shared in everything they 
held except their dissipations and their reward of 
glory. For glory, he had to wait half a century. 

That curious, black episode of early Western 
civilization, the Chinese persecution, followed hard 
upon their first arrival. Why this thing began, 
what quality in the Chinese nature irritated our 
pioneers beyond all justice and sense of decency, 
remains a little dim and uncomprehended to this 
generation. They were an honest people—hon- 
est beyond our strictest ideas. ‘They attended to 
their own business and did not interfere with ours. 
Their immoralities, their peculiar and violent meth- 
ods of adjusting social differences, affected only 
themselves. Not for thirty years was there reason 
for believing them a danger to American working- 
men. But the fact remains. Our pioneers cut off 
their sacred pig-tails, cast them forth disgraced, 
beat them, lynched them. Professional agitators 
made them a stock in trade. By the power of re- 
iteration, this honest people came to figure in 
the public mind as a race of thieves, this cleanly 


the 


ce Bed 


THE ALLEY 


“ Those broken, dingy streets in which the Chinese made art of rubbish.” 


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OLD CHINATOWN Si 


people—inventors of the daily bath—as “dirty” 
and “‘diseased,” this heroic people, possessed of a 
passive fortitude beside which our stoicism is cow- 
ardice, as poltroons. With a dignity all their own, 
they suffered and went about their business, though 
death lay at the end. 

The day came when the Chinese themselves 
nearly justified the professional labor agitator. 
The romantic, unsettled period of the gold rush 
passed into history; the age of bonanza farming 
followed; the state buckled down to stable industry. 
But two and three and five dollars a day was still a 
lure to the Canton man. ‘Their number increased 
with every Pacific steamer. Even yet they were 
no real menace to American labor—the state at any 
time might have swallowed up fifty thousand more 
without harming a single white workingman—but 
that menace lifted itself in the immediate future. 
Ripples from the black Dennis Kearney outrages, 
the shameful Montana massacres, reached Wash- 
ington. Congress passed the Exclusion Law. 
When that happened, there vanished the last log- 
ical objection to the Californian Chinese. 

A gradual change passed over the spirit of Cali- 


6 OLD CHINATOWN 


fornia. We were a long time learning that human 
souls, different but equal, souls softened by forty 
centuries of highly moral civilization, lay under 
those yellow skins, under those bizarre customs and 
beliefs. The Chinaman, being a gentleman, gives 
himself forth but charily. I think that we first 
glimpsed the real man through our gradual under- 
standing of his honesty. American merchants 
learned that none need ever ask a note of a China- 
man in any commercial transaction. His word is 
his bond. Precedent, as well as race characteristic, 
makes it so. 

The newer generation of Californians grew up 
with baby-loving, devoted Chinese servants about 
them. The Sons and Daughters of the Golden 
West did not, indeed, draw their first sustenance 
from yellow breasts, as the Southener has drawn 
it from black ones. That mystic bond was lacking. 
But a Chinese man-servant had watched at the 
cradle above most of them, rejoiced with the par- 
ents that there was a baby in the house, laughed to 
see it laugh, hurried like a mother at its ery. A 
backyard picture in any of the old Californian 


OF mien: 
le a eee 


<— 
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eo 


THE AIRING. 


“ With what pride the father—never the mother—used to carry the boy baby down 
the street in all his finery.” 


~e UDIUNAOfIIDI [DIA IY OF JIDIS Mats Aaaau YyIum ‘sjaaajs ayy fo afy sy 


‘GTO CNV ONNOA SYAAVO 


OLD CHINATOWN Teoy 


mansions included always the Chinese cook, grin- 
ning from the doorway on the playing babies. 

This Chinese cook was a volunteer nurse; for 
him, the nursery was heart of the house. He was 
the consoler and fairy-teller of childhood. He 
passed on to the babies his own wonder tales of 
flowered princesses and golden dragons, he taught 
them to patter in sing-song Cantonese, he saved his 
frugal nickels to buy them quaint little gifts; and 
as the better Southerner, despising the race, loves 
the individual negro through this very association 
of childhood, so the Californian came to love the 
Chinaman that he knew. In his ultimate belief, 
indeed, he outstripped the Southerner; for he came 
first to a tolerance of the race and then to an ad- 
miration. 

The older people, and more especially the house- 
wives among them, reached understanding and 
admiration through a different channel. The 
Chinaman was an ideal servant. Now, when the 
insolent and altogether less admirable Japanese are 
taking their places beside the cook stoves, your 
San Francisco housewife will never cease lament- 


8 OLD CHINATOWN 


ing for the old order. His respect for a contract, 
written or spoken, made him observe every article 
of the servant’s code. Unobtrusive, comprehend- 
ing in all its subleties the feminine mind, part of 
the household and still aloof from it, the Chinese 
servant did the work of two. American maids and 
stirred up no friction in the process. Supreme vir- 
tue of all to his mistress, he delighted in “com- 
pany,” in all the pomps and parades of a house- 
hold. Nothing pleased him more than to take the 
responsibility of a dinner or a reception upon him- 
self, to plan confections for it, to have a hand in the 
decorations. ‘The other side of his life, which 
might be frescoed with fan-tan and highbinder 
troubles, he kept for Chinatown and his night off. 
Perhaps on that might he dropped his month’s 
wages in the gambling houses of Ross Alley, per- 
haps he smoked a few pipes of opium, perhaps he 
knew more than the police would ever learn of the 
highbinder shooting proclaimed all across the first 
page of that newspaper which he handed you at 
breakfast. He never troubled you with these 
things. To you, he was first the perfect servant, 
and, if his term lasted long enough, the shy, and 


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OLD CHINATOWN oe 


gentle familiar, versed in the arts of friendship. 
Who more gracious than your Chinese cook or 
laundryman calling on Chinese New Years, his 
hands full of lilies for the women of the family, 
his pockets of nuts for the children? Under kind- 
ness, he might blossom into a feudal retainer of the 
family, lingering on for years in a voluntary 
slavery, truced only when, the price of Chinese serv- 
ice having gone up, he made his just demand for 
a yraise in pay. So, out of family life, both child 
and parent learned to appreciate and love the race. 
The Chinese had conquered our foolish hatred by 
patient service; and I call it a glorious conquest. 
Long before this, a whole generation before, and 
while they still lived amidst terrors and alarms, 
they had laid the foundations of that which became 
Chinatown. Like all Spanish towns, San Fran- 
cisco clustered first about a plaza—Portsmouth 
Square the pioneers renamed it. On its fringes, in 
the days when the streets ran gold and the Vigi- 
lantes were the whole law, appeared the first mod- 
ern buildings. Then, with the unaccountable, 
restless drift of American cities, shops and whole- 
sale houses passed on down into the hollows and 


10 OLD CHINATOWN 


“made lands” reclaimed from the Bay marshes. 
The Chinese, following in, took possession of those 
old buildings about Portsmouth Square. An un- 
written city ordinance, strictly observed by succes- 
sive Boards of Supervisors, held them to an area 
of about eight city blocks. Old St. Mary’s Church, 
the first Roman Catholic Cathedral, marked the 
southern edge of that area; and to the last day of 
the old city any report that the Chinese were moy- 
ing south of St. Mary’s drove the newspapers and 
the city fathers to arms. The Chinese conquest 


of affection never proceeded so far that the Amer- 


icans wanted them for neighbors. 

These eight blocks, supporting a population which 
varied between ten thousand and thirty thousand 
according to the season of the year, lay close to the 
very centre of San Francisco, between the business 
district and the old palaces of Nob Hill. Wealthy 
citizens, walking down to their offices from the 
citadel of the town, used to envy the Chinese their 
site; the city authorities were forever starting a 
movement to get “dirty Chinatown” out into the 
suburbs, that the white might take the Quarter 
back. But the Chinese owned much of the prop- 


TOY VENDOR. 


. 
= 


TH 


Rig SEO LEAT RE RE 


Eph EEA RGN GROUT RRR 


THE MOTHER. 


“ Soberly dressed, keeping close that they might not dishonor their lords through the 
glance of forbidden eyes.” 


OLD CHINATOWN 11 


erty, and paid a high rental for the rest. With 
their conservatism and their persistence, they stuck. 
They stuck even after the fire, when San Francisco, 
starting a dozen projects in the heroic rebound of 
its spirit, tried to seize the occasion to move China- 
town. 

This district of old-fashioned business blocks, 
laid out on fine lines by the French architects who 
wrought before the newly-rich miners began to buy 
atrocities, the Chinese transformed into a sem- 
blance of a Chinese city. They added sheds, lean- 
tos, out-door booths, a thousand devices to extend 
space; they built in the eternal painted balconies 
of which the Chinaman is as fond as a Spaniard. 
Close livers by custom, they lodged twenty coolies 
in one abandoned law office; they even burrowed 
three stories under ground that they might make 
space for winter-idle laborers, overflow of the 
northern canning factories. Clinging always to 
their native customs and dress and manners, they 
furnished forth their little stores and factories, 
their lodging houses, their restaurants, with the 
Chinese utensils of common life in which they ex- 
press their inborn art sense. 


12 OLD CHINATOWN 


So the quarter grew into a thing like Canton and 
still strangely and beautifully unlike. Dirty—the 
Chinaman, clean as a whistle about his person, in- 
ventor of the daily bath, is still terribly careless 
about his surroundings. Unsanitary to the last 
degree—Chinatown was the care and vexation of 
Boards of Health. But always beautiful—fall- 
ing everywhere into pictures. 

. This beauty appealed equally to the aTae citi- 
zen, who can appreciate only the picturesque, and 
to the artist, with his eye for composition, subtle 
coloring, shadowy suggestion. From every door- 
way flashed out a group, an arrangement, which 
suggested the Flemish masters. Consider that 
panel of a shop front in Fish Alley which is to me 

the height of Dr. Genthe’s collection. It is a_ 
Rembrandt. Such pictures glimpsed about every 
corner. Youlifted youreyes. Perfectly conceived 
in coloring and line, you saw a balcony, a woman 
in softly gaudy robes, a window whose blackness 
suggested mystery. You turned to right or left; be- 
hold a pipe-bowl mender or a cobbler working with 
his strange Oriental tools, and behind him a vista of 
sheds and doorways in dim half tone, spotted with 


THE SHOEMAKER. 


“ Human souls, different but equal, souls softened by forty centuries of high civil- 
ization, lay under those yellow skins.” 


* 


is 


f RESCUED SLAVE GIRLS. 


“A girl four years old, past the delicate stage of infancy, would bring from fifteen 
hundred to two thousand dollars as a speculation.” 


OLD CHINATOWN 13: 


the gold and greens of Chinese sign-boards. Beau- 
tiful and always mysterious—a mystery made visual 
by that green-gray mist which hangs always above 
the Gate and which softens every object exposed to 
the caressing winds and gentle rains of the North 
Pacific. 

In the greatest of his short stories, Frank Norris 
said that there were three circles in Chinatown. 
The first was this life of the streets, which never 
grew stale to the real Californian. The second was 
that prepared show which the tourist saw and which 
supported those singular persons, the Chinatown 
guides. ‘The third was a circle away down below, 
into which no white man, at least none who dared 
tell about it, ever penetrated—the circle which re- 
volved about their trafficking in justice, as they 
conceived of justice, about their trade in contra- 
band goods, such as opium and slave girls. 

Rather, I think, were there four circles, for in 
between the circle of Show Places and that of Hid- 
den Things came the family life and industrial 
activity of the quarter. 

This Chinatown was a Tenderloin for the whole 
Chinese population of the Pacific Coast, the pleas- 


14 OLD CHINATOWN 


ure palace where fish cutters from the northern 
salmon canneries, farmers from the Sacramento 
deltas, fruit pickers from the hot San J oaquin, 
gold washers from the Sierran placers, came to en- 
joy themselves and to squander their earnings be- 
tween seasons. Although a part of its reputed 
viciousness was the exaggeration of race hatred, no 
man could deny that it was tough. Also, it had 
gathered about it the lowest of those white tramps 
and soldiers of ill fortune who haunted that termi- 
nus of Caucasian civilization, San Francisco. The 
habitation of a darker race has an attraction for 
the debased; witness the environs of negro streets 
in the South. Because “sin is news and news is 
sin,” this side of Chinatown was always before the 
public. 

Nevertheless, a real life of homes and quiet in- 
dustry went on there also. The Chinese overall, 
cigar and shoe factories were important enough to 
draw the hatred of labor unions for a generation 
long. Much of the American tea and silk trade 
was controlled from those streets. The Six Com- 
panies, virtually the Chinese Chamber of Com- 
merce—though bound by an alliance closer than 


Sp Sar ee ¢ . 4 . _ 


A, CORNER‘ON THE HILLSIDE. 


“This bit of the mystic, suggestive East, so modified by the West that it was neither 
Oriental nor yet Occidenal—but just Chinatown.” 


THE CELLAR: DOOR. 
“Children high and low, rich and poor, they had the run of the streets.’ 


OLD CHINATOWN 15. 


any commercial organization which we know—had 
but to assert itself, and the whole Pacific Coast 
paid attention. The merchants, as they grew rich, 
sent to China for their old wives, married new ones 
by proxy, slipped brides past the inspectors, bought 
them from the slave dealers. In their toy estab- 
lishments, rich often with spoils of the Orient, they 
bred children and developed a kind of polite so- 
ciety. 

To a degree which we cannot comprehend, the 
place of the respectable Chinese woman is in the 
home. So the foreign American seldom saw the 
true lady of the Chinese Quarter. She lived tight 
in her little flat, she bound her hair with sober fil- 
lets, she dressed quietly in the dark greens that 
uniform respectability, and she went abroad only 
on great business or on the occasion of great festi- 
vals. 

But children,—high and low, rich and poor, they 
had the run of the streets. And they were the 
pride, joy, beauty and chief delight of the Quarter. 
Hope of heaven and everlasting worship to their 
fathers, nothing was too bright and beautiful for 
them. So mothers and nurses decked them out in 


16 OLD CHINATOWN 


the brightest tunics, the most cleverly conceived 
caps all tinkling with golden devil-chasers, the 
whitest little socks and shoes, the most gorgeous 
ear-tassels, fit, otherwise, only for the altars of the 
joss. Tiny, yellow flowers of the world—how the 
American women, native and tourist, used to crane 
their necks and smile and coo at them as they 
passed! With what pride the father—never the 
mother—used to carry the boy baby down the 
streets in all his finery! How the Chinese, child 
lovers from the bottoms of their hearts, used to pay 
them court on the corners! Usually, they were con- 
tented and rather stolid babies; only once in a blue 
moon did one of them cry. And when it happened 
that a baby cried on the streets, the Chinese, bar- 
gaining at the open shop-fronts, used to look after 
him and grin and exchange comments in Can- 
tonese sing-song as though it was the greatest joke 
in the world. ‘ 

School, whether in the Oriental schoolhouse 
which the city maintained or in the private Chinese 
seminaries of the rich and conservative, was out by 
four o’clock. ‘That was the brightest hour of all 
the day in those streets. Dupont and Washington 


YOUNG ARISTOCRATS: 


“ How the Chinese, child lovers from the bottom of their hearts, used to pay them 
court on the corners!” 


y e 

. 
* 
‘ 
Cre ’ 
» 
hes 
- 
‘ 


A FAMILY FROM THE CONSULATE. 


“ Hope of heaven and of everlasting worship to their fathers. . . . Nothing was 
too bright and beautiful for them.” 


= 


OLD CHINATOWN Las: 


and Stockton blossomed with racing, tumbling ba- 
bies, all bright in silks. The barber, the grocer, 
the butcher, the lantern maker, dropped tools and 
occupation and came to the doorways to watch 
them play. The elder sisters, too many of them, 
alas, with the bound feet that showed how high their 
mothers expected them to marry, walked arm on 


waist like school-girls the world over, swaying with 
that gentle motion which marks the Chinese lady 


from her common sister. The big boys, much more 
subdued than our own twelve year olds, got out 
those feathered shuttlecocks with which the Chi- 
nese youth imitates football, and frisked along 
Dupont street or over into Portsmouth Square. 
A curious game that was, without team work or 
rules—nothing to it but dexterity of foot. Some- 
thing essentially Oriental in its grotesque grace ap- 
peared in the attitudes of these boys as they kicked 
the ball, first forward like the punt of a Rugby 
player, and then backward over their shoulders like 
a French movement in la savate. Sometimes the 
more radical mothers joined their babies after 
school, walked down to the Square—a fearful jour- 
ney for them—and made a little picnic about the 


18 OLD CHINATOWN 


football players. That children’s hour of the 
Quarter showed Chinatown at its sweetest and most — 
gracious. 

Once only, in my recollection, came a day when 
all the women, high and low, virtuous and lost, had 
free run of the streets. This was the Good Lady 
Festival, celebrated every seven years in honor of 
that illustrious Chinese woman, princess and mar- 
tyr, who was raised for her virtues to godhood. 
Her symbol is the little shoe, the tapering shoe of 
the lily feet, which she threw into the river before 
she died. And on the day of her festival, woman 
was raised to the level of man. She was free to 
walk the streets, to sacrifice, to bow publicly be- 
fore the outdoor altars where priests in white robes 
and white fillets tapped their little gongs and sang 
incessantly to the joss. The “Prayer store” on Du- 
pont Street, where one might buy anything and 
everything sacred to Chinese religion, banked its 
counter and filled its windows with tiny shoes, from 
a thing of gold which one might hang on his tunie 
as a souvenir to a valentine thing in pink rice paper, 
large enough to clothe a proper lily foot. 

On that day, also, might the respectable woman 


HOLIDAY DRESS. 


““ On that day might the respectable woman wear those parti-colored robes, those trou- 


sers of pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments for the hair. . . .” 


4 


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NEW YEAR’S DAY BEFORE THE THEATRE. 


“ Four or five times a year, some fixed or movable feast brought out everything that 
was wonderful in the Quarter.” 


OLD CHINATOWN 19 


wear those parti-colored robes, those trousers of 
pale, neutral shades, those jade and gold ornaments 
for the hair, publicly appropriate at other times 
only to the fallen among women. From the brass 
and cedar treasure chests kept carefully under the 
beds in their tiny flats, they took these festival 
clothes, saved, perhaps, since the wedding; and 
Chinatown became one blaze of color. Here, as 
everywhere else, fashions changed; one marked 
that phenomenon usually by the varying patterns 
in the children’s caps. That year, I remember, 
light blue was most in vogue. The really modish 
tunic, at that festival of the Good Lady, was of a 
robin’s egg color, above and below: but about the 
centre of the body ran a band of deep blue, edged 
with scroll work and embroidered, like as not, in 
gold. The black, straight hair, glossy with oint- 
ments, was usually bound by a great clasp of flat 
gold which amounted almost to a cap. 

Down the street, that night, walked a procession 
of priests in white robes. They carried a great 
banner inscribed with sacred Chinese characters: to 
right and left of them walked stavemen bearing 
weapons of the old Empire. Behind followed the 


20 OLD CHINATOWN 


women, for all the world like a swaying bed of 
great, gaudy flowers. Along the sidewalks burned 
unnumbered sacrificial candles and lights, sur- 
rounded with the roast pig and rice bowls of a 
Chinese sacrifice. When the procession was over, 
the women, emancipate for the night, went to 
feast—those of no caste to the restaurants, the la- 
dies to their sombre homes. : 

Next morning, when the careful priests of Con- 
fucius had picked up the papers on the streets and 
burned them, that the sacred name might be sullied 
by no base uses, the women were back in their nests 
again, soberly dressed, keeping close that they 
might not dishonor their lords through the glance 
of forbidden eyes; and only the harlot and the very 
young maiden walked freely and frequently 
abroad until their next holiday. Alas, that festival 
of the Good Lady came again in a year when no 
one knew if there was to be any more Chinatown! 

They love a fiesta, those Californian Chinese; 
four or five times a year, some fixed or movable 
feast brought out everything that was wonderful 
in the Quarter. Two or three of these holiday 
occasions linger in memory. On Stockton street 


HOLIDAY FINERY. 


*“So mothers and nurses decked them out in the brightest tunics, the most clev- 
erly conceived caps all tinkling with golden devil-chasers, the whitest little 
socks and shoes, the most gorgeous ear-tassels, fit, otherwise, only for the 
altars of the joss.’ 


DRESS CLOTHES. 


“They wore the long, silk tunic of neutral tint which is dress coat and frock coat 
both to the Chinese gentleman.’ 


OLD CHINATOWN 21 


stood the clubhouse of a merchant organization 
only one whit less powerful than the Six Compa- 
nies. Do not ask me its name;if I could remember, 


you would forget. ‘Those Chinese monosyllables 
are dreadfully elusive. Once in three years, this 


club celebrated the glories of its joss and kept open 
house. ‘The reception was for white and Chinese 
alike; in this time of peace and good will, they drew 
no color line. All races mixed in the crowd which 
packed their rooms to drink tea and scan the in- 
numerable paper altars in honor of this immortal 
god or that dead hero. Mostly, these altars told, 
in flimsy paper statuettes and legends on red rice 
paper, some tale of old China. ‘There, life size, 
was the great god, sitting in fearful state and cast- 
ing insolent eyes upon the priests who sang before 
him with many prostrations. About him, stood a 
dismounted hero in the tasseled and feathered war 
bonnet of old China; the princess his wife; a horse 
which was a caricature of an animal in shape and 
a wonder of art in blended coloring; the seven god- 
desses, gazing indifferently upon rich offerings of 
- roast pig, punks and fruit. 

Near the entrance, in a recess of his own, sat the 


22 OLD CHINATOWN 


terrible and luck-bringing joss of the Tong. He 
is a devil as well as a god; he is beatifically kind 
and terribly cruel. His image is all white in face 
and clothing, but his eyes are weeping tears of 
blood. He is so lucky that just to touch him will 
make you win at lottery or fan-tan, and if you 
should but own him, no game from pie-gow to Wall 
Street could resist you. So he was much sought 
by the thievish; and between festivals the Tong 
kept him in a burglar proof vault. _On this public 
occasion, when his owners brought him out to bless 
and help their guests, two white watchmen guarded 
him with club and gun. No Chinese watchman 
could be trusted, in face of that awful temptation 
to win everlasting prosperity at one stroke. 

Once, in this week of festivity, they brought him — 
out on the streets. That was on the last night, 
when the elders of the ‘Tong, in caps and long dress 
tunics, publicly distributed bread and meat to all 
the poor of Chinatown, whether white or yellow. 
Then, priests bore him high in air on their shoul- 
ders that he might radiate fortune on the unfor- 
tunate. I wonder sometimes whether he, bearer of 
luck and material salvation, saved himself in the 


THE CHINESE SMILE. 


“A .backyard picture in any of the old Californian mansions included always the 
Chinese cook, grinning from the doorway on the playing babies.” 


+ 


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heh Bom 
Sy PaaS eS 


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: 
= 
+ 


THE MOUNTEBANK. 


“Who forgets the Pekin Two Knife Man who used to perform for nickles a sword 
dance of the Old Empire?”’ 


OLD CHINATOWN 23 


great disaster; or whether he went down to de- 
struction in the downfall of his house. 

I remember, too, a certain night in the annual 
festival of devils, when the orthodox Chinaman 
purifies his house, as the Hebrew sprinkled the 
blood of sacrificial lambs on his lintels. The air, 
in the Chinese cosmos, is full of these devil people; 
a Chinaman wastes a deal of his time and energy 
worrying about them. At home, I believe, the very 
orthodox never make a straight entrance to any 
building—for devils cannot turn a corner, and a 
crooked entrance is a safeguard. Behold how su- 
perstition yields to convenience! The Chinese of 
San. Francisco had adapted to their uses abandoned 
American stores and business blocks. It was in- 
convenient, almost impossible, to screen against 
devils the entrances to American-built stores. 
The practical Chinaman, therefore, gave up the 
doctrine of his creed, and took the more ardently 
to propitiatory sacrifices and offerings and devil- 
scaring firecrackers. And at the great devil feast, 
he fairly outdid himself in casting out all the works 
of evil, that his house might be clean for another 
year. 


24 OLD CHINATOWN 


On the night which I am recalling, a certain ob- 
servation upon the Chinese crystallized in my mind. 
Out of his mental difference from us, his oblique 
thinking as contrasted with our straight reason- 
ing, his subtlety as contrasted with our directness, 
his commercial honesty as contrasted with our com- 
parative commercial dishonor, his gentility as con- 
trasted with our rudeness; further, out of our 
wholly unnecessary persecution and race hatred, he 
has come to a superior contempt of us and our 
ways. Certain broad spirits among them look 
across the race line and regard us as human beings; 
certain humble personages among them, such as the 
old family retainers whom I have mentioned al- 
ready, develop a curious, dog-like affection. But 
in the main, they feel a passive contempt. We 
were to them a medium of commerce when we 
stopped at the stores to buy, meddlers when we 
interfered with lotteries, fan-tan games, plague, 
highbinder wars and other affairs which were none 
of our business, plain pests when we swept down 
upon them with uniforms and patrol wagons, but 
always Things—never persons. You passed them 
on the streets; they turned out for you; but they 


A VISTA. 
“Spotted with the golds and greens of Chinese sign-boards.’ 


, 


S NOSPACE ST’ 


“ He would notice you no more than a post—unless you pulled a camera on him,” 


OLD CHINATOWN 25 


glanced at you no more than they glanced at the 
innumerable sleek cats sunning themselves in the 
doorways. You might pick a specially beautiful 
or interesting Chinaman and stare at him all day; 
he would notice you no more than a post—unless 
you pulled a camera on him. A Chinese father 
would, indeed, soften if you stopped to pay court 
to the baby in his arms; it was too much to expect 
that he would refuse tribute from anything in the 
earth below or the air above to the pride of his heart 
and the hope of his immortal salvation. That, it 
seemed to me, was the only point at which your 
Chinese willingly granted intercourse to the de- 
spised race. 

But on that night, when the punk-sticks and the 
pocket altars burned at every corner and before 
every sweet-meat stand, when all the alleys were 
canopied over for the use of the priests, when every 
window glowed soft from the sacrificial lights 
within; on that night, when horror and mystery 
held the air—then you paid court to no Chinese 
baby. Approach him, and his father drew him 
sharply away; persist, and his bearer would hurry 
off on his slipping, high-soled shoes in a panicky 


26 OLD CHINATOWN 


run. Pidgin English brought no answer to your 
most polite inquiries. The children imitated their 
elders; the big brother or sister, caring for little 
Ah Wu or tiny Miss Peach Blossom of the lily feet, 
scattered fearfully from the foreign touch. We, 
inferior, uncomprehending, were brothers to the 
powers of the air. Only this I noticed—your 
money was still welcome at the stores. Perhaps it 
was right to take devil tribute. 

It seems that there is no Lent, no Thy of Atone- 
ment, in the Chinese calendar. All religious fes- 
tivals are also feast days. Even on that night, 
men turned from fighting the devils to make holi- 
day. Every restaurant held its banquet, every 
wealthy home its reception. 

What is it which makes one picture of life 
linger in memory while others, and more marvelous 
ones, fade out? As vivid as though its bright im- 
pression was still dancing on my retina, I remem- 
ber a dinner party which I saw that night. Per- 
haps I had with me a friend, whose identity is the 
one thing which has gone from me, but whose 
strong and stimulating pull on my mind lingers 
in this rise of memory to a permanent thing; per- 


4 


GR MM BB 


od 


ONO LIKEE!” 


elders; the big brother or sister, caring for little 
Ah Wu or tiny Miss Peach Blossom of the lily feet, scattered fearfully from 


the foreign touch.” 


“The children iniutaited tlreir 


«Mpjg way, YIM 07 * * * Uo1Ddnz20 pun sj00} paddoap ‘aaynut UsdJUD] IY} “AYIING B44 ‘4aI043 |Y1 ‘4IQAKq IYT ,, 


‘NVW NOOTIVd AHL 


OLD CHINATOWN 27 


haps that was one of those nights of youth when 
the world is right and life dances down before you, 
and all your powers are multiplied by some golden 
number of the gods. At any rate this picture re- 
mains, while greater and brighter things linger only 
as blurred outlines. 

It was on the top floor of the old Man Far Low 
Restaurant on Dupont street, a show place it is: 
true, but also the great café of the rich and disso- 
lute. That floor, running clear through the block, 
was a succession of private dining rooms, divided 
one from the other by pictured, scroll-work screens. 
Carved woods and painted lanterns decked the 
walls; the tables were of black teak, delicately and 
minutely inlaid. The guests sat not on chairs, but 
upon square stools of the same teak wood. From 
the front apartment, you stepped out upon a bal- 
cony made into a little Chinese garden. This 
looked upon the dark stretch of Dupont street. 
At the rear was another balcony, a small, undec- 
orated thing; and from that you saw first Ports- 
-mouth Square with its gilded caravel set to remem- 
ber Robert Louis Stevenson; further on the city 
buildings, topped by the masts and spars of Adven- 


28 OLD CHINATOWN 


ture Ships in from Pacific voyagings; and still fur- . 
ther the golden delights of the great bay. One 
who came to enjoy the Man Far Low must buy 
at least tea and sweetmeats. The tea, poured 
from the crack between two bowls, one inverted 
over the other, was of a light lemon yellow, and 
in taste no more than hot water slightly flavored 
by an aromatic herb. Color and taste were de- 
ceptive; it would kill sleep for a night. One ate 
the sweetmeats—picked ginger, preserved nuts, 
plums and citron—from the end of a spindly tin 
fork. When the guest had finished, the waiter 
stood at the head of the stairs and bawled some- 
thing in Cantonese. That was the check; the cash- 
ier, sitting in round cap and horn spectacles at the 
desk below, knew by it how much to collect. 

That night, however, the Chinese occupied it; a 
great, expensive dinner, costing its tens of dollars 
a plate, was proceeding in the front apartment. 
At the biggest table sat a dozen Chinese men- 
about-town, very dignified as to dress, for they 
wore the long, silk tunic of ravishing neutral tint 
which is dress coat and a frock coat both to a 
Chinese gentleman. With each man sat his woman 


ce Mp1 asauiy v fo aruvjquias D oJUut pamsof{supsy asautyD ayy ° * * 4oIaqsip sry ,, 


‘OS]D a4ayz UO quan Kajsnpur qainb pun samoy fo afi pvas Pp 


“LHAaULS LNOdNd NO 


THE SWEETMEAT STAND. 


. . . Flashed out a group, an arrangement, which suggested the Flemish 
masters.” 


‘e 


OLD CHINATOWN 29: 


—not at the table, but just behind, so that she 
had to reach caressingly over his shoulder to 
get at the hundred viands in their toy porcelain 
bowls. When her lord’s appetite failed, she fed 
him with her plaything hands; when he wanted 
a cigarette, she lighted it for him between her own 
rouged lips. One of these women, I remember, 
had a homely, irregular face, with a broad mouth, 
but with an illumination and expression in her 
features exceptional among Chinese women—they 
tend to the brainless, doll type. A soubrette sauci- 
ness showed in her every gesture, but you felt that 
it was a measured impudence which knew its con- 
venient bounds. Musicians, squatted on a woven 
straw couch in the corner, were tormenting a moon 
fiddle, a sam yin and a gong. In the rests of that 
sound, which I shall not call music, she would Jean 
forward and throw out a remark; and the company, 
already a little gone with rice brandy, would laugh 
mightily. 

Presently, the feast having reached the stage 
when food is less to the feaster than drink, they 
began to play “one-two.” I must explain that 
game, so simple and so appealing to the convivial. 


30 OLD CHINATOWN 


You challenge a partner. If he accepts, you throw 
out from your closed hand any number of fingers 
from one to four and call off in a loud tone of 
voice the. proper number of fingers. He throws 
out the same number of fingers and calls the num- 
ber after you. But at last you call out, craft- 
ily, any one number, and throw out a different 
number of fingers. And if, by calling that num- 
ber after you, he shows that he has failed to watch 
your hand, he has lost; and he must drink a cup 
of rice brandy as a forfeit. He who first becomes 
drunk is “it.” It goes faster and faster, until all 


the table is playing it in pairs. “Sam!” “Sam!” 
“See!” > ““Seel". ~- “Weel: 222 F Gri. seen 
“Sam!? Then a howl of Oriental laughter, more 


crackling and subdued than ours; for the propo- 
nent, on “Sam” (three) has thrown forward only 
two fingers, and the opponent, falling into the trap, 
has thrown out three. So he is caught, and down 
his throat goes the forfeit. | 

And as they drank and played, and played and 
drank, something deep below the surface came out 
in them. Their shouts became squalls; lips drew 


THE LILY-FOOT WOMAN. 


“ Swaying with that gentle motion which marks the Chinese 
lady from her common sister.’ 


eae 


FORMAL DRESS. 


A woman in softly gaudy 


robes.’ 


, 


Hae 


4 


OLD CHINATOWN 31 


back from teeth, beady little eyes blazed; their 
very cheek bones seemed to rise higher on their 
faces. I thought as I watched of wars of the past; 
these were not refined Cantonese, with a surface 
gentility and grace in life greater than anything 
that our masses know; they were those old yellow 
people with whom our fathers fought before the 
Caucusus was set as a boundary between the dark 
race and the light; the hordes of Ghengis Khan; 
the looters of Atilla. 

The “its” fell out one by one, retired with some 
dignity to the straw couch and to sleep. She of 
the saucy, illuminated face crept close to her lord 
and whispered in his ear—she, like all her kind, 
was taking the moment of intoxication to ply her 
business; and the debauch was nearly over. Only 
when I was out on the street, and purged somewhat 
from the impression of Tartar fierceness which 
that game of “one-two” had given me, did this 
come into my mind: there had been not one un- 
seemly or unlovely act in all that debauch of young 
bloods and soiled women, not one over-familiar 
gesture. Tartar though they had shown them- 


32 OLD CHINATOWN 


selves, they had remained still Chinese gentlemen 
and—may I say it of women in their class/— 
Chinese ladies. | 
_ These pretty and painted playthings of men 
furnished a glimpse into Frank Norris’s Third 
Circle, the underworld. We shall never quite un- 
derstand the Chinese, I suppose; and not the least 
comprehensible thing about them is the paradox of 
their ideas and emotions. On the anomalies of 
Chinese courage, for example, one might write 
a whole treatise. A Chinese pursued by a mob 
never fights back. He lies down and takes his beat- 
ing with his lips closed. If he is able to walk when 
it is done, he moves away with a fine, gentlemanly 
scorn for his tormentors. To take another in- 
stance; at Steveston, in the mouth of the Frazer 
River, the white and Indian fisherman struck. 
The owners, supported by the Canadian militia, 
decided to man the boats with Oriental cannery 
laborers. The Japanese jumped at the chance. 
The Chinese, to a man, refused to go out on the 
river. They were afraid of it. Yet a Chinese 
merchant condemned to death by the highbinders, 
aware that the stroke may come at any time from 


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«ANAUIT dOH, AHL 


OLD CHINATOWN 33 


any alley, walks his accustomed way through the 
streets without looking to right or left. So it 
goes, all through their characters. Nothing fits 
our rules. 

By the same token, underneath their essential 
courtesy, fruit of an old civilization, underneath 
their absolute commercial honor, underneath their 
artistic appreciation of the grace in life, runs a 
hard, wild streak of barbarism, an insensibility in 
cruelty, which, when roused, is as cold-blooded and 
unlovely a thing as we know. 

Chinatown, the Tenderloin for all the Western 
Chinese, lived not only by tea and rice and overalls 
and cigars and tourists, but also by the ministry to 
dissipation. It had gathered to itself the tough 
citizens, and especially the gamblers. Gambling 
is a darling sin to all the race; take his fan-tan 
counters and his pie-gow blocks away, and he will 
bet on the number of. seeds in an uncut orange. 
With most, it is a mere diversion. Your efficient, 
quiet houseboy, no more trouble about the place 
than a well ordered cat, will go into Chinatown 
on Saturday night, have his little whirl at fan- 
tan, smoke, perhaps, his one pipe of opium, and 


34 OLD CHINATOWN 


return in the morning none the worse for his 
social diversion. Others get the passion of it 
into their blood. One hears continually of this 
or that Chinese laborer, who, having saved for fif- 
teen years to go back to China and live on his in- 
come, has dropped into a fan-tan house on the eve 
of his departure, lost his whole pile in one night, 
and returned, with a great surface indifference, to 
begin a life of service over again. Fat and power- 
ful waxed the keepers of gambling houses. ‘They 
came to be controlling factors in the vicious side - 
of Chinatown; and they gathered under them all 
the priests of vice into one alliance of crime and 
graft. ‘Those who traded in slave girls, those who 
ran the cheap, internicine politics of the ward, those 
who lived by blackmail, and especially those gen- 
tlemen of fortune known as_ highbinders, whose 
reason for being was paid murder, lived and moved 
in the shadow of the gambling game. 

In the age of public exposés, we have discovered 
that the powers which we pay to keep order and 
virtue among us and the powers which minister to: 
our dissipation have a mysterious affinity—that the 
policeman is constitutionally apt to unite himself 


KIN. 


ARD 5 


4 


THE LEOP 


“LAMUVW ONINYOW AHL 


OLD CHINATOWN 35. 


in a business way with those who live by vice. In 
this development of civilization we are as children 
beside the Chinese; and out of this situation grew 
the highbinders, adventurers in crime. [Tor they 
were not only criminals; they were formal and rec- 
ognized agents of justice. Crime and punishment 
had become tangled and involved beyond any power 
of ours to separate them and straighten them out. 
The constituted police of San Francisco struggled 
with this paradox for a generation long; and, 
finally, perceiving that the Chinese would settle 
their own affairs in their own way, gave it up and 
let the thing go. They kept only such interest in 
the Quarter—these Caucasian police—as would per- 
mit them to gather that rich graft which made a 
Chinatown beat a step toward fortune. 

Before I go on with the Highbinder Tongs, of 
which no white man knows too much, I must ex- 
plain that the Chinese have a positive talent for 
organization. They do everything, from running 
a store to keeping up public worship, by companies. 
Your insignificant Chinese shop-keeper may belong 
to a half dozen tight, oath-bound organizations— 
social, religious, financial, protective. In the early 


36 OLD CHINATOWN 


seventies of the last century, certain organizations 
known to the whites as “Chinese Masons” began 
to attract journalistic attention. So, at about the 
same time, did certain mysterious and unavenged 
Chinese murders. These Masons and these mur- 
ders, closely connected beyond a doubt, were the 
first public manifestation of the Highbinders. 
Some of these societies, the Chinese say, are off- 
shoots from the old Triad Society, responsible for 
the Tai-Ping Rebellion and later for the Boxer 
trouble; some of them are legitimate social organi- 
zations, degenerated and gone wrong. ‘Through 
vicissitudes of which the best-informed Chinatown 
detective knows only the shadows, they settled down 
into five or six unions of toughs and paid thugs, 
the hatchets and revolvers of their members always 
at disposal of any Chinese who wanted revenge 
or sued for justice. Blackest and toughest of all, 
perhaps, were—and are—the Bow Ons, who com- 


bined blackmail with their murder; but they were 
all black enough. For dead and wounded, their 


lists must read like the roster of a Civil War regi- 
ment. 
I wonder if I can convey the process by which, 


Saousnl sof pans 40 asuanads pajuvm oy 


t 


asaury Kuno fo qyosodsip yw skvnyv saaquam arayz Jo s4aajoaas pun syayoqny ayy ‘sdnyi pwd puv sysnoz fo suo1un x18 40 aang ,, 
‘NOILVNV100Ud ONOL FHL 


Mey om oe 


i etic 


| 


BEFORE THE BIG JOSS HOUSE. 


“They built in the eternal painted balconies of which the 
naman ts as fond as the Spaniard.” 


Chi- 


OLD CHINATOWN 37 


in this transplanted Orient, assassins combined with 
justice to keep social order? Be it known that the 
Chinese has the most haughty contempt for our 
law. He seldom appeals to it; when he does, look 
out for some deeper plot. Perhaps he is not wholly 
in error; he has perceived how easily a clever lawyer 
can beat American courts. Aloof from our 
laws, then, and still apart from the laws of the 
Orient, these perpetual foreigners had to create 
some system of justice and punishment among 
themselves. Of this justice and punishment, the 
Highbinders, criminals themselves, are also the ex- 
ecutioners. 

Suppose, then, that you are Wong Kip, Chinese 
merchant, and that one steals from you or commits 
the fearful crime of repudiating a just debt. You 
do not bother with the American courts. If the 
thing is bad enough to warrant the trouble, you or 
your Tong-man negotiate with a Bow on or Suey 
Sing Highbinder. For a sum varying according 
to your needs and resources, the hired assassin gets 
out his gun. 

One night, the man who has injured you walks 
fair and straight through the streets of Chinatown; 


38 OLD CHINATOWN 


and a shadow falls in behind him. The shadow 
glances right and left to make sure that no white 
person is watching. The Chinese spectators—they 
do not matter. The shadow walks with his hands 
tucked, muff fashion, in his long sleeves. They 
two, avenger and victim paired, reach a dark spot 
by awning or alley. The shadow creeps up close; 
his hands fly suddenly apart; a revoiver goes off; 
the sacrifice to justice crumples up on the pave- 
ment. The murderer, with the motion of a quarter-. 
back passing the ball, tosses the revolver to another 
Chinese; it goes on from hand to hand. When the 
police come at last, the murderer is chattering with 
the crowd about the body, and that revolver lies in 
an entrance a half a block away. Twenty Chinese 
saw it done and know who did it. Will they testify 
to it in court? Not as they value their lives—not 
even if they are brothers of the dead. 

Only—and here comes the imperfection in jus- 
tice of this kind—the brothers and tong comrades . 
of the executed felon often question the verdict 
and take an appeal. Hiring a highbinder from 
another tong, they mark the man who put the wheels 
of justice into motion—or one of his tong; it is 


SHE Vil oe RLEOREN © BY NIGHT: 


All who have followed a guide through Chinatown will remember this show-place. 
The quarters which tourists paid to “ see the hop fiends”’ kept it going for years, 


in spite of the Health Board. 


OLD CHINATOWN 39 


nearly the same thing—and hold an execution on 
their own account. This may lead to more re- 
prisals and still more, an endless chain. 

Such is the highbinder situation in one of its 
simplicities. But the further you follow it the more 
complex it becomes. In the first place, these Chi- 
nese toughs, like white toughs, grow restive under 
peace. When no employment offers, they start 
trouble among themselves. ‘The Bow Ons and the 
Suey Sings were eternally straining each at the 
other. An insult, a quarrel over fan-tan or the 
price of a slave girl, might set off the mine. There 
might, too, be a real grievance. It might be a mis- 
tress that had deserted her Bow On lover and taken 
up with a Suey Sing. Here, as elsewhere, women 
played ducks and drakes with the affairs of men. 
The offended Suey Sing man would slaughter a 
Bow On. Not of necessity the offending Bow On; 
anyone would do who wore the hated badge. The 
Bow Ons, touched in their soldier pride, would even 
up the score; the Suey Sings would dispute that the 
~ score was even and pick off another Bow On; and 
the war would begin. Where were our police all 
this time? “Baffled.” The Chinese took care of 


40 OLD CHINATOWN 


that. The blue devils who jumped from the noisy 
wagon would arrest the “suspicious loiterers’” whom 
they found about the corpse, keep them awhile, and 
let them go for lack of evidence. The police of 
the little New York Chinatown had the same 
trouble when they tried—and failed—to control the 
late war of the On Leongs and the Hip Sings. 
This war cost a dozen lives at least; it brought not 
a single conviction. A few Chinese have been 
hanged in California for highbinder murders. In 
every case there remains a dreadful suspicion that 
we hanged the wrong man, his life sworn away for 
some dark purpose of the Chinese. 

Further to complicate the mess, these highbinders 
had a way of playing foul with their own clients. 
Constitutional blackmailers, they lived, between 
wars, on the terror which their name inspired. An 
order for an assassination might always be turned 
into blackmail money. ‘The executioner would ap- 
proach his marked man with a polite, Oriental trans- 
lation of “Dilly, Dilly, come here and be killed.” 
When the condemned felon had pleaded enough, 
the executioner would promise to let him go upon 
payment of a weekly fine. The poor actors in the 


THE PALACE HOTEE.” 


An angle of “ The Devil’s Kitchen’’--the most dilapidated hole in Chinatown and * 
a constant reproach to the Board of Health. 


OLD CHINATOWN 41 


two theaters, men of no standing whatsoever 
among their countrymen, suffered terribly from 
this highbinder game. ‘The slave girls were always 
falling in love with actors and finding ways to meet 
them. This offense, in the law of custom, meant 
death for the actor. The highbinders watched 
these little games, got evidence, and, by threats of 
reporting to the legitimate owners of the girls, 
kept the actors penniless. 

A highbinder war tended to go on and ever on. 
It ended, usually, in a general adjustment brought 
about by intervention of the Six Companies. 
Once, a war got beyond all power of this supreme 
Chinese tribunal in the Occident, and came to 
trouble the Imperial Master in Peking. The See 
Yups represent the laboring class, the “unions,” in 
Chinatown, and the Sam Yups the capitalists. In 
the early nineties, disputes about the price of labor 
grew into a general strike of all the shoe, overall 
and cigar operatives. When the strike reached that 
stage when Occidental strikers begin to picket and 
~ to loosen entertainment committees, one side or the 
other called in the highbinders. So wide were the 
interests involved, so bitter were both the Sams and 


A2 OLD CHINATOWN 


Sees, that this became a general war, with weekly 
murders in sheaves of twos and threes. It lasted 
a year, it sent Chinese merchants into bankruptcy 
by the score, and it paralyzed all industries except 
the tourist trade. Its Gettysburg, its Marengo, 
came when the highbinders lined up in opposite 
doorways of Ross Alley, the narrow, overhung 
street of the gamblers, and fought until the police 
reserves charged in between. 

At about the same critical period in this war, the 
See Yups bagged a general. “Little Pete,” 
Chinese millionaire, gambler and man of affairs, 
had been lord of that little parish. A mere coolie 
in the beginning, he had the golden touch; he made 
everything pay. He formed a kind of gambling 
trust in the Quarter, and went out after the Cau- 
casian racing game. He had played at Chinese 
gambling like Riley Grannan—cold, calculating, 
without excitement, making the real gambler pay. 
Just so he played the races, until he had mastered 
that game and was ready to corrupt it—if it were 
possible to corrupt Californian racing. Only 
when a great scandal broke out in the affairs of 
the California Jockey Club did the whites discover 


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that a system of pulling horses and permitting 
“long shots” to win, a system which had been sus- 
pected for some time, was conceived and conducted 
solely by “Little Pete.” 

Little Pete was a Sam Yup. The See Yups, 
whose paid highbinders were running behind the 
score, put a heavy price on the head of this promi- 
nent citizen. He sat one afternoon in a barber’s 
chair, having his ears scraped. Two bullets, fired 
through the open door, caught him in the back and 
finished him. 

His funeral was the greatest public ceremonial 
that Chinatown ever saw. Echoes from its gongs 
reached the Chinese Empire. The Consul General 
got orders to make this foolishness stop. He failed; 
the war, the state of bankruptcy, went on. The 
Minister removed him. Hs successor had no more 
luck. Finally, the minister put in Ho Yow, Ox- 
ford graduate, brother-in-law of Wu Ting Fang, 
member of a progressive family, a man who under- 
stood the whites and the Chinese alike. 

Ho Yow studied the situation and sent represen- 
tations to China. Suddenly, in scattered districts 
of Canton, certainly innocent persons found them- 


Ad OLD CHINATOWN 


selves under arrest. These were the _ relatives, 
even to the third degree, of the men respon- 
sible for this war in San Francisco. He served 
notice on See Yups and Sam Yups alike that any 
more murders in Chinatown would be avenged 
upon the persons of these Cantonese relatives. 
This ended the war with a bang; before the Consul 
General and the Six Companies, capital and labor 
made peace. This heroic measure discouraged, 
temporarily, the highbinder industry. The threat 
of arrests in China, shaken at the Tongs, has more 
than once been a restorative of order. 

The underground passages of Chinatown have 
appealed mightily to the imagination of melo- 
dramatists, authors of sensational tales, writers of 
specials for the Eastern press, and others who 
guide and stimulate the popular imagination. A|- 
though some declare them a myth, those passage- 
ways of the Third Circle really did exist at one 
time. Their end antedated the great fire. In the 
late nineties, a Board of Health, appointed by the 
last honest municipal government which the old 
city knew, forestalled epidemics by going through 
the Quarter with warrant and deputy. Against 


MATGCCAd ATAVLAUOAA AHL 


OLD CHINATOWN AS 


the diplomacies and concealments of the Chinese, 
the inspectors closed up cellar after cellar, filled 
in passage after passage. A few, effectually hid- 
den from that Board of Health or restored under 
the venal Schmitz administration, remained to the 
end. Still those who knew old Chinatown mar- 
veled, when they looked into the gaping cellars left 
by the fire, to see how little of this mole-work re- 
mained.: | - 

So wide was this maze, in earlier days, that a 
Chinese who knew his way might travel by it from 
almost any point in Chinatown to almost any other. 
A reporter who held the confidence of the Chinese 
has told me how he subnavigated the quarter during 
the quarantine of 1901. The Federal doctors, sus- 
pecting bubonic plague, had drawn a line tight 
about Chinatown; and, since Federal and not mu- 
nicipal authorities were doing this thing, the pro- 
hibition against passing the lines was absolute, 
even.to “gentlemen of the press.” 

A Chinaman, caught outside himself, said to this 
reporter: “I take you.” They entered the little 
den of a white cobbler in California street. The 
cobbler, after a whispered exchange of words, 


46 OLD CHINATOWN 


opened a trap door under his counter. The Chinese 
guide, crouching in the shadow, lighted a red paper 
lantern; and down a ten-foot ladder they went. 
The rest was a bewilderment of knife-edge passage- 
ways, stopes, ladders; sudden encounters with 
closed doors, from behind which came murmers of a | 
mysterious life within; glimpses, through the terrific 
glooms, of other pedestrians in those underground 
streets. Once, they passed through a mouldy lodg- 
ing house, its walls dripping with exhalations of the 
earth, its day-shift of inmates peering out at them — 
in affright; once they came upon a latticed window, 
strangely futile in this unlighted world, through 
which the reporter saw slatternly women working 
with something on the floor—doubtless they were, 
rolling, for warmed-over consumption, the scrap- 
ings of opium pipes. Once, he thought he heard 
the sound of moaning. Rumors of plague were in 
the air. It came to him that this might be some one 
sick unto death with it. The sense of darkness and 
confinement made the thought of contagion by 
Black Death doubly terrible; it was as though he 
were shut in a dungeon alone with a spectre. 

They came at last square up against a rough 


“HE B’LONG ME!” 


* A Chinese father would soften if you stopped to pay court to the baby in his arms.” 


OLD CHINATOWN 47 


wooden wall. The guide fumbled and scratched; 
a panel slid back as though Mrs. Radcliffe had im- 
agined it. A drop of three feet brought them intc 
a cellar; from there they walked out of a Chinese 
grocery store into the full daylight of the Quarter. 
When the reporter had looked about to his satis- 
faction, the guide said: “You go back notha’ way.” 
Starting from a lodging house next door to the 
grocery, they traversed more drops and rises, dark 
passages, hidden apartments, and came out in a 
cellar of the Latin quarter. They had walked all 
the way under Chinatown. 

Another man has told me how he rambled 
through some of these passages with a Chinese ac- 
quaintance—this was a mere visit of curiosity. 
When, bewildered and utterly lost, he declared that 
he had enough of foul air and suggestion of horri- 
ble mystery, his guide mounted a ladder and 
scratched at a trap door. It opened; and they were 
in the kitchen of the Jackson street Chinese Thea- 
tre, with the gongs of a Chinese orchestra clang- 
ing on the stage above their heads. 

The exchange of opium, smuggled in from 
Pacific ships by bay pirates; the heartless slave 


48 OLD CHINATOWN 


trade; the preparation of bodies for convenient re- 
turn to their ancestral grave mounds; the hidden 
revenges of the Highbinders—all went on in these 
catacombs, twenty feet below the pavement of Du- 
pont and Washington. What tragedies their 
earthen walls must have witnessed, what comedies, 
what horror stories, what melodramas! ‘There it 
was, below everything; the Third Circle whose cir- 
cumference was darkness and whose centre death. 

Doubtless I am following here the newspaper 
fashion and dwelling too much upon this criminal 
aspect of the Quarter. If so, it is because the crime 
was so picturesque, because it expressed so clearly 
the difference of this civilization from its parent 
Orient and its adopted Occident. I am not quite 
done with it, either, for I must speak of the slave 
trade. 

The world knows from Christian missionaries 
how little the careless and criminal, among the 
Chinese at home, value a girl baby. The sale of 
such children is an established custom—born of the 
low esteem in which women are held and of the ter- 
rible Chinese famines. Those Californian Chi- 
nese, who were degraded enough to stoop to such 


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OLD CHINATOWN 49 


things, sold these babies into pure shame and the 
ruin of souls. So small was the supply, owing to 
the difficulty of smuggling women past Federal in- 
spection, that prices were high; it paid a coolie 
woman to bear female children. <A girl four years 
old, past the delicate stage of infancy, would bring 
from fifteen hundred to two thousand dollars as a 
speculation. At thirteen or fourteen, when she was 
of age to begin making returns to her owner, her 
price was three thousand. Slavery it was, literal 
and hopeless; and that in face of the Fourteenth 
Amendment. The federal authorities tried to 
break it up. Pretty generally, they failed. The 
trouble lay in the Chinese contempt for our courts. 
Snatch a girl from a brothel, and what happened? 
A slave from babyhood, kept in ignorance of any 
other world than that of her brothel, she believed 
the word of her keeper when he said that white men 
want girls only to pickle their eyes. and eat their 
brains. First, one must win her from that idea. 
Then, the master would always bring action in the 
courts through certain white attorneys unscrupu- 
lous enough to take such cases. Chinese witnesses 
would be found to go upon the stand and swear that 


50 OLD CHINATOWN 


this girl was a daughter or niece of the master; 
and the poor girl, the moment she faced her master 
in court, would fall into the cowed custom of a 
lifetime, quail before his eye, and swear falsely 
that these witnesses told the truth—that she wanted 
to go back to her “uncle.” This system, shameful 
in our eyes—though indeed there are institutions 
just as cold-blooded and evil in our own social — 
structure—existed from the first day of Chinatown; 
exists, I make no doubt, to-day. . 
From a woman, and she a pretty, fair-spoken 
Scotch maiden, this slave trade took its hardest 
blow. Donaldine Cameron was a girl stripling of 
twenty when she came to take charge of the Pres- 
byterian Mission, which concerns itself especially 
with the lives and souls of Chinese women. She 
says herself that she inherited her tastes and talents 
from a line of Scotch parsons grafted on a line of 
sheep-stealing Camerons. ‘The spirit in her led 
her straight to the slave trade. First, as all her 
predecessors had done, she tried the police and the 
courts. She found the police inefficient or venal, 
the courts ineffective. She saw girl after girl, who 
had welcomed rescue in the beginning, crumple up 


APTER SCHOOL. 


‘Tiny yellow flowers of the world. 


OLD CHINATOWN 51 


on the witness stand and swear herself back into 
Hell. 

Nevertheless, Miss Cameron kept on, raiding and 
fighting in the courts. In a warfare of ten years, 
she won a kind of Fabian victory. She usually 
lost her girl in the end, but before that end she had 
cost the owner dear in smashed doors, valuable 
property kept idle, disturbance of business, and the 
heavy fees which cheap white attorneys used to 
exact from the Chinese. Playing her desperate 
lone hand, she reduced the traffic by about one-half. 

Our lives in old San Francisco were all tinged a 
little with romance; but I can think of no life 
among us which so quivered with adventure as 
hers. Would that I could convey the quaint, 
workaday style in which this soncy Scotch gen- 
tlewoman related her adventures—the material of 
a dime novel, the manner of a housewife telling 
about her marketing. During one raid, she met at 
the door of the brothel some unforeseen barrier 

which delayed the attack. As she waited for the 
~axman, she looked through the latticed window 
upon a confusion of painted, flowered, Chinese 
women, all squalling together. From this group, 


52 OLD CHINATOWN 


a girl disentangled herself and came running, her 
arms outstretched, toward the raiders. It was the 
girl they had come to rescue; and by this fatal slip, 
born of over-eagerness, she revealed that she was 
first cause of the raid. The slave master perceived 
it, too; before Miss Cameron’s eyes he knocked her 
down and dragged her by the hair through a slid- 
ing panel, which opened at his touch. When at 
last Miss Cameron gained entrance, she found a ~ 
dozen passages leading confusingly from this secret 
door; the inmates had lost themselves in the Third 
Circle. She never saw that girl again; but months 
later the underground gossip of Chinatown brought 
Miss Cameron the end of the tale. The master, 
down there in the bowels of the earth, had beaten 
her to death in presence of his other cowering 
women. 

This piece of artistic detail from another of her 
raids which failed: The inmates had rolled into a 
trap door under a bed, and escaped into the under- 
world. So orderly and so deserted was the place 
that she wondered, at first glance, whether she had 
not made a mistake. Then she noticed a samesin in 
the corner, and perceived that its strings still quiv- 


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OLD CHINATOWN 53 


ered and gave forth a dying sound—showing how 
recently it had dropped from Une lily hands of the 
lily woman. 

One of the slave girls in the mission was an or- 
phan, sold as a baby; she had never known any life 
but that of the brothel. Neither had she any edu- 
cation save in certain primitive arts of woman, any 
religion except a superstitious fear of her masters. 
“If you escape from us down to Heli,” they had 
told her, “we will drag you up by the hair. If 
you escape to Heaven, we will drag you down by the 
eeu 

A certain man, a Christianized Chinese as it 
turned out later, used to visit that house. He sin= 
gled out this girl, talked to her apart of the life 
outside, showed her that she was a slave and a pris- 
oner, informed her of the white woman who lived 
only to rescue such as she. 

“When he spoke of a white woman,” said this 
girl, “I was much afraid, because they had told me 
that the whites were devils who wanted to get me 
just to eat my brains. Though I knew nothing 
different, I had always been discontented with my 
kind of life, and had been wishing for something 


54 OLD CHINATOWN 


else—I never knew what. After he went away 
from me, I thought about all this. I fell into such 
a melancholy and longing for the open world that 
I was ready to take my chances with the white 
woman being a witch. I could think of nothing 
but escape. 

“When this man visited me again, I told him that 
I would trust the white woman. He advised me 
then to wear some secret token so that they might 
know whom to rescue; because if they failed, and 
my master knew that I had brought on the raid, 
they might abuse me afterward. We agreed on a 
lily-flower over my left ear. He told me also to 
fight and cry when they carried me away—” 

Well, Miss Cameron smashed that door and 
snatched from the arms of her slave master the 
girl with the lily over her ear. All the way down 
the stairs, she kicked and fought; but when they got 
her alone in the carriage, she said: “Why didn’t 
you come for me before?’ This was one of the 
few girls who ever stood by her guns on the stand. 
She kept her freedom; and the last I heard of her 
she was getting ready to marry that Chinese who 
first told her about Miss Cameron. 


THE: PAPER COLLECTOR. 


“That withered wisp of a Confucian priest whose task tt was 
all the papers on the streets.” 


to 


gather day by day 


~ 


THE LATEST BORN. 


“ Usually they were contented and rather stolid babies; only once in a blue moon 
did one of them cry.” 


OLD CHINATOWN 55 


Donaldine Cameron—how her name, after these 
years, so few in number, so many in change, bring’s 
up the other characters and originals of that curious 


little parish! Does the Emperor of the Universe 
still parade about Portsmouth Square, I wonder? 


He was the mildest, gentlest paranoiac that ever 
followed the moon. For years he walked the 
streets; a tall old man, with one of the sparse 
beards which Heaven grants to but few Chinese. 
Always, as he walked, he smoked a long, curved 
pipe and turned a look of kindly disdain upon the 
populace. He believed that all these whites and 
Chinese were his subjects; but he was a benevolent 
ruler, well content with his domain. For that rea- 
son, and also because everyone liked him, no one 
ever took the trouble to lock him up. The Central 
Police Station came to inhabit the Hall of Justice 
across Portsmouth Square. At four o’clock on fine 
days, the downtown squad used to deploy on the 
sidewalk. The Emperor was always there. He 
would walk down the line with the air of a general 
reviewing his troops, salute formally, and march 
back to Chinatown. When the captain in command 
was good-natured, he let his policemen return the 


56 OLD CHINATOWN 


salute—which they did with all gravity in the 
world. | 

Who can ever forget the pipe-bowl mender, the 
pipe-bowl mender who sat in the same spot—on 
Dupont street a few doors from Jackson—for a 
decade long? A picture always, what with his bow- 
string bits, his tiny hammers, his leather cases, he 
was most a picture on cold days when he got out his. 
martin-lined jacket from the family inheritance, 
and his fur cap. In the short-lived drama, “The 
First Born,” which so enchanted San Francisco 
Power the author and Benrimo the actor made 
this pipe-bowl mender chorus to all the things 
which happened on a certain tragic Chinatown 
night. Who forgets the Pekin Two Knife Man 
who used to perform for nickles a sword dance of 
the Old Empire? Who forgets that withered wisp 
of a Confucian priest whose task it was to gather day 
by day all the papers on the streets, that the name — 
of the god-sage might never be profaned? Who 
forgets Ah Chic of the splendid, noble face, the 
greatest actor (I verily believe) of all his time in 
America—Ah Chic who lived and died in the Jack- 
son street theatre, playing seven nights a week for 


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OLD CHINATOWN 57 


the pure love of playing, to coolies who could never 
understand? Who forgets the lantern maker, he 
who plaited moons of red and gold delight out of 
paper and bamboo strips, betraying the artist in all 
those devices by which he made each one a little 
different from the other? 

Gentle figures, seen bright through the sunset 
scarlets of a youth that is past, do you linger yet, 
now that your old environment is gone? 


GETTY CENTER LIBRARY iat 


nthe, Arnold, 1869 
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